Friday, February 08, 2008

Upon the Occasion of Becoming Sixty

Until I was forty most everyone thought I was much older than I chronologically was. Leroy and I easily drank at "old men bars" in Kalamazoo when I was a mere nineteen. As my olde college friend Bob has said: "You have the advantage in our waning years that back when we were twenty, you looked like you were sixty." Now a lot of this has to do with hair and not improper carbon dating. Hair being a physical attribute of which I have been devoid since, well, forever. But somewhere around forty, the eyes of the world misted over or perhaps it was just I never actually matured sufficiently but for the last twenty years, most estimates at my number of rings have been well below actual my calendar progression. This will mean that some occasional readers of this blog will be agape and agog to discover that yesterday was my sixtieth birthday.

But I am not the first to reflect upon the incident of aging nor the last of my generation to see themselves as "not looking my age", either in my daydreams or my eHarmony profile. Others, however, have perhaps reflected more eloquently:

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations." Anais Nin

My day was occupied as it usually is with this laptop and several writing projects. But as synchronicity would have it, Bob, the aforementioned olde college chum, was in town on business and we met for dinner. Aside from the old geezer talk about aches and pains we have acquired and the fact that we "were never this old before"; there was some trenchant analysis of the politics of today. Both Bob and I were political science majors back in the Sixties and he has spent the last 30+ years in Washington DC. He had some truly enlightening perspectives on the phenomenon of "Hillary Hatred", which seems to arise from the unlikeliest and darkest of places. The single topic I recall most clearly ended with the mutual agreement that "moral fanaticism is a cancer on this country."

After exploring our aged perspective on the state of the universe; please note at "our age" we neither offer solutions nor solve any of the staggering array of the human malaise. However, being true children of the Sixties and being that someone had left Bob an extra ticket, we ended the evening with Cirque de Soleil's Beatles tribute "Love". As usual Guy Laliberte's gang has constructed yet another Cirque level experience. With the Beatles they did take on a world wide icon and despite the constraints of time and song selection, it was a most entertaining show. There is just too much of the Fab Four to contain in the space and time of the Love theatre at the Mirage but we both recommend the show to our aging comrades and their offspring.

The Cirque Love ends, of course, with All You Need is Love(video), so shall I.

Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age. Jean Moreau